Bluesy Sunday

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Mike Bloomfield left the Butterfield Blues Band and moved to California, forming The Electric Flag in 1967. This album, A Long Time Comin’, was one of the first released by a rock band to mix horns with guitars, predating Blood Sweat and Tears and Chicago by a few months. The most-recognized track is probably Howlin’ Wolf’s The Killing Floor, but there’s plenty of other good material here. I thought of the band when I heard it mentioned during Episode 9 of The Blues, which my public radio station airs every Sunday. Thanks, HPR!

5 Comments

  1. I remember that (second handed). My tastes were about 10 years behind my contemporaries, so while they were listening to 1978, I was listening to 1968. I used to love that album with Bloomfield, Al Kooper and Stephen Stills…but I can’t think of the name.

  3. I love one of the original BS&T’s tunes:
    “Sometime in Winter”…whatta voice on Al Kooper..
    That song reminded me of cold, dreary days in NYC just before Christmas…and I don’t know why…

  4. Sorry, toxiclabrat, you have your BS&Ts mixed up a bit. Sometimes in Winter was on the first David Clayton-Thomas album, not Kooper’s Child Is Father To The Man. And Steve Katz wrote and sang the song.
    Kooper and Katz had been in one of the great unknown bands of the mid-to-late ’60s, the Blues Project. They (like Mike Bloomfield) were a buncha good Jewish blues boys — Danny Kalb, Andy Kulberg, and Roy Blumenfeld were also mainstays of the group.
    When I was in college, a few of us sat around stoned for a while and came up with what we called the “genealogy” of rock. By that, we meant connections between and among musical artists who played/worked together, sort of a “six degrees of Kevin Bacon” thing. For instance, we could connect The Turtles to Led Zeppelin … Mark Volman and Howard Kaylan of The Turtles were “Flo & Eddie” in the Mothers of Invention, Eric Clapton got a credit on an early Mothers record, Clapton was in the Yardbirds, and so was Jimmie Page of Led Zep.
    Clapton was one of the principal “connectors” of genres, and so was Al Kooper. Kooper joined Dylan and his crowd to the LA folk rockers through Steven Stills, to the blues through Bloomfield, to the Bay Area psychedelic bands through bassist John Kahn (a member of the Jerry Garcia Band). As I recall, we could never find a way to connect Creedence with anyone else (at least, through 1972 or so) — none of them ever played on anyone else’s records, and no one else ever played on theirs.

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